Still in the Flood Frenzy

Many people were impacted by the Little Sioux River flood in June. Mother Nature definitely has her “hold my beer” moments and that was one of them. My heart goes out to those that lost their homes and their personal belongings. The road to recovery is definitely a long one.

The Cherokee County Conservation Board is also on that road as we’ve seen the most damage to our parks and office as we’ve ever seen. As a result of the flood, we cancelled 14 days of summer camps and educational programming, had approximately 360 acres under water, received road damage to 7 parks/areas, a cabin that needs a whole new interior, electrical camping infrastructure has to be replaced in a park, and sustained infrastructure damage and equipment loss at our office. Talk about throwing a wrench into summer plans.

Damage cost estimates total in the six figures, which includes us trying to do much of the work ourselves since contractors are also inundated by this event. How does this impact the tax payer? It limits the services we provide. We’re unable to offer 20 campsites at Silver Sioux for the rest of this camping season, we can’t rent one cabin out for the rest of this year, river accesses are taking awhile to clean up and establish access again, damaged roads limit access to entire parks or portions of parks, projects that staff were planning to do this summer to improve park experiences are now pushed to next year, and educational programming was limited due to staff being redirected to construction projects.

In between trying to fix things, we were also trying to stay on top of cabin rentals, equipment breakdowns, and mowing portions of 21 different park areas around the county.

Where are we now?

Most roads are fixed. All parks are open. The office is mostly done. We haven’t started fixing the cabin. Some electrical at Silver Sioux has been replaced, the rest is back ordered. We’ve just started the process of working with FEMA. What a summer.

Thanks for your patience as we’ve tried to tackle these issues to give you back your public areas. Hopefully next summer we can work on the projects that we were hoping to complete for you this summer. Feel free to stop down at the office during regular business hours to see our newly updated educational space. Here are photos showing the flood impact in various areas that you can see.